Abstract

‘Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes’ (2023) is a videoessay that deals with three films on the 2008 financial crash, The Big Short (2015), Margin Call (2011) and Too Big To Fail (2011), each treated individually and in combination in the seven episodes plus coda of the videoessay. The videoessay was conceived to develop and test a parametric or constraint-based approach to the analysis of the film material. Jason Mittell has written of the innovative potential of ‘computationally manipulating sounds and images to create new audiovisual artifacts whose insights might be revealed through their aesthetic power and transformative strangeness’. Mittell’s account (2021) of his ‘deformative’ experiments on Singin’ in the Rain, and the range of scholarly and fan practices on which he draws, serve as inspiration and rationale for Men Shouting.

References

Bibliotech Mittell, Jason (2021). ‘Deformin’ in the Rain: How (and Why) to Break a Classic Film’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 15:1. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/1/000521/000521.html. O’Leary, Alan (2021). ‘Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a Parametric Videographic Criticism’, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies,10:1, 75–98. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16269.

Full Text

‘Men Shouting: A History in 7 Episodes’ (2023) is a videoessay that deals with three films on the 2008 financial crash, The Big Short (2015), Margin Call (2011) and Too Big To Fail (2011), each treated individually and in combination in the seven episodes plus coda of the videoessay. The videoessay was conceived to develop and test a parametric or constraint-based approach to the analysis of the film material. Jason Mittell has written of the innovative potential of ‘computationally manipulating sounds and images to create new audiovisual artifacts whose insights might be revealed through their aesthetic power and transformative strangeness’. Mittell’s account (2021) of his ‘deformative’ experiments on Singin’ in the Rain, and the range of scholarly and fan practices on which he draws, serve as inspiration and rationale for Men Shouting. The videoessay is also an attempt to exemplify a poetics and epistemics of parametric videographic criticism that I have set out in an article entitled ‘Workshop of Potential Scholarship’ (2021). Drawing on Donna Haraway, I suggest in my article that parametric approaches to videographic criticism may be understood as kind of ‘cyborg scholarship’ in which activities of knowing are engaged in by an assemblage of hardware, parametric system, software, and organism. The challenge, as I conceive it, is to imagine a scholarship that speaks from this cyborg position and does not just speak about it. ‘Men Shouting’ is an attempt to enact such a scholarship and my role in the activity of cyborg scholarship was that of curator. The challenge was to allow the analytic ‘thinking’ to happen beyond the individual scholar-human, in the collaboration with Python and programmer, Premiere and parametric procedure, but also to facilitate the emergence of that thinking as video essay. If the video essay is to be a ‘form that thinks’, then the question and achievement of form is crucial: the arrangement of the materials is not simply rhetorical or aesthetic but political and epistemic. Each episode of ‘Men Shouting’ is generated by applying one or more constraints to one or more of the three films. These sets of constraints are adapted from various sources: from other video-essayists; from experimental literature; and from the exercises used to train videographic critics at the influential Scholarship in Sound and Image workshops at Middlebury College. The constraints are referred in the episode title cards as ‘technic’, meaning a technical method or scientific procedure. On one level, the goal of the videoessay was to trace the texture of the three films’ rendition of historical events and circumstances, and to make this available for critique. In the search for patterns, the analysis cuts across the three texts and refuses any analytic distinction between the films’ different modes of reflexive comedy, taut drama and didactic realism. The video essay may offer some standard take-aways about gender roles in cinema and historical storytelling: men act and women, when not merely appearing, are connoted in relation to motherhood and men. But its real object is to discern what might be hiding in plain sight or audibility. ‘Men Shouting’ is concerned to access the affective dimension by describing and remixing a seductive and naturalized content. It is much less concerned with narrative or representation, or indeed with ideology in any straightforward way. “I” attempt in this video essay a kind of immanent critique in which the cyborg scholar is implicated. As such, ‘Men Shouting’ deploys the pleasures and resources of the films themselves, and ironizes, by pushing rational procedure to a pitch of absurdity, its own analytical means.